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Other view: How to show Iran's protesters U.S. support

USA Today
Published 3:00 a.m. CT Jan. 7, 2018

In this photo released by official website of the office of the Iranian Presidency, President Hassan Rouhani speaks during a cabinet meeting in Tehran, Iran, Wednesday, July 19, 2017. Iran's president said Wednesday that his country will stand up to the United States and reciprocate for any new sanctions that America imposes on the Islamic Republic.(Photo: AP)

The bravery of Iranians standing up to their repressive regime is breathtaking.

In 2009, that courage was personified by the shooting death, captured on video, of 26-year-old singing student Neda Agha Soltan, killed when ruling clerics cracked down mercilessly on protesters filling the streets of Tehran and other major cities.

Despite the regime's brutality, Iranians are back in the streets, heroically defying their government and angry that Tehran squandered on regional adventurism the windfall that came with sanctions relief after the 2015 nuclear arms agreement.

More than 20 have been killed, and hundreds have already been arrested, as the world waits to see whether Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, will override the pragmatic instincts of President Hassan Rouhani and again send thugs into the streets to crush the unrest.

In the meantime, President Trump — who has seemed uninterested in human rights violations in Turkey, Egypt, the Philippines and elsewhere — has found the proper voice for civil liberties in Iran. "Iranian govt should respect their people's rights, including right to express themselves," he wrote in the first of several tweets supporting demonstrators.

This stands in contrast to President Obama, who was mostly silent during the "Green Movement" unrest of 2009, cautious about providing Tehran a pretext for blaming the demonstrations on American interference.

Given the outcome in 2009, our support of that hands-off strategy at the time might have been misplaced. Protesters in the streets fighting for freedom deserve to know that the world's most powerful nation, built on the liberties and values they are risking their lives to achieve, supports their dissent.

Moreover, the motives behind this latest wave of discord dovetail even more precisely with crucial U.S. concerns about Iran.

Where the 2009 movement sprang from middle-class anger about a rigged re-election for hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, this new, working-class dissent is over the billions Tehran spends sponsoring regional violence in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen — all at the expense of bread-and-butter issues back home.

"Leave Syria alone, think about us!" protesters chanted at the first site of unrest, in the Shiite pilgrimage city of Mashhad.

The mullahs controlling Iran can invest their oil money, made available after agreeing to halt their nuclear weapons program, in one of two ways:

They can keep buying weapons for Houthi rebels in Yemen, extending billions in credit and troop deployments to a dictator in Syria, and bankrolling Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

Or they can improve the lives of their 80 million people still mired in rising poverty, 10% inflation and high joblessness.

Iranians were promised economic relief after the nuclear agreement when sanctions were lifted, but it hasn't happened.

Tehran previously blamed its people's misery on those sanctions. But that excuse is gone now, which is one reason Trump should refrain from tearing up the nuclear deal. A second reason is that the world already has one dangerous rogue nation with nukes in North Korea and doesn't need another, particularly one with civil unrest.

It's unknown whether the latest demonstrations, which waned as the week went on, will succeed where the 2009 protests failed — or whether U.S. actions will make any difference. But brave protesters risking bullets, batons, tear gas, arrest and torture should know that the world's democracies stand in solidarity with them, and the mullahs should know that another brutal crackdown will not be costless.